Help! My file won’t upload to WordPress

You want to upload a great image, or a pdf file, or a spreadsheet, or a …. The list goes on. We can share files through our WordPress blogs and websites using the Media, Add New option in the Dashboard – not just images.

Sometimes, however, we may get the message “Error saving media attachment.” or we are told that the file is too big – this latter make it nice and clear where the problem lies, but that first one can have us stumped – yes, us too – just the other week we had this and did not look at the most likely reason straightaway – hence this post!

“Error saving media attachment.”

The first thing to do is check the settings. In your Dashboard go to Settings, Media and look in the Uploading Files section, the Store uploads in this folder. WordPress tells you that the default is wp-content/uploads and if you have something different to this, change it. Most times this will be the cause of the problem.

Of course there may be other reasons but for those we’d generally want to dig a bit deeper and look at permissions and things – for those we usually Google the issue or pop to the WordPress.org forum to see what others have done with the same problem. We’re always here to help if you want to run it by us – pop an email to hello@blogmistress.com with as much information as you can and we’ll take a look.

If your file is too big

Your file is bigger than your server is set up to allow. Let’s face it, if we were allowed to upload files of any size willy-nilly, our lovely WordPress blog or website would soon be creaking.

So – how do you know if your file is too big? Well when you go to upload your image you should be able to see how big it is in bytes (take a look at the video).

How do you know how big a file you’re allowed to upload? If you go to Media, Add New it will tell you the Maximum Upload file size there.

If you have a once-off need to upload a bigger file, you can of course do it the old-fashioned “manual” way using FTP, but do have a think about how long your file may take to load.

If you want to be able to upload larger files regularly, you’ll need to change the settings and may need to talk to your hosts about that. We’ll cover this in another blog post soon.

If you’re ever unsure, just ask the team here and we’ll help you.

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Comments

Hi,
I just changed the settings on the media page as indicated in your video, but I still cant upload any images (my limits indicates max size is 64mb and y photos size are only around 500kb so there shouldnt be any problem.
The uploading bar usually goes up to 30% and the it gets stuck there and nothings happens (even if I wait for 20 minutes or so).
Any ideas what it could be?
Thanks for you help.
G

I’ve been watching a video on adding images. So I’ve created a new page, and my page looks like his except on his there is Upload/Insert and them some icons for images, video, music, etc on mine I have the Upload/Insert but after that the camera image is on top of the music icon and whether I click on Uploadinsert or the icon it simply asks me to select a file and they are more than 10MB and I get message image is too large.
In the video the image is crunched to fit.
What am I doing wrong?

Hi David
Something to check is how big a file you are allowed to upload. To quickly check this, go to Media, Add New and you should then see a note telling you the “Maximum upload file size:”. If you need that increased you may need to ask your hosts to action. There are other ways around this but it’s likely best to see what your hosts or webmaster has to say first.

I tried your tips but I am still having trouble uploading photos. It will take really long to upload and when it does appear in my media library it won’t load to the post I am working on and says that the image has no data and to try again. This just starting happening. I have a plugin called smush-it that sizes all my photos so that my blog loads quickly for users. I have used it for a while with no problems. I am not sure what the issue is. Can you help?

I cannot upload images, and I’ve tried a million things. looking at your suggestions, when I click SETTINGS–>MEDIA, I cannot find an Uploading Files section with which to apply the necessary changes. this is driving me insane for some irrational reason; I’d appreciate any help.

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